Monthly Archives: March 2020

Let’s state up front that I’m not saying stop social distancing, we’re on this path and it would be idiotic to stop once on it, but let’s start looking at what we did right and wrong here because the is a chance this is going to go in wave and maybe we should think before engaging in this silly policy for a second round.

But once it’s out there there are really only two courses of action. Either shut things down to keep “flattening the curve” or to just let the dice fall where they may—the first comes with lower death tolls but large economic problems, the latter with huge death tolls but less economic problems. Every country seems to have decided on taking an idiotic middle path so we can get the death toll of letting the cards fall where they may PLUS an even bigger death toll.
And the real problem here is that no one is thinking. In every discussion of “flattening the curve,” I haven’t heard any discussion of the long term.
What do I mean by the long term? Well, as was so succinctly put in the film the Big Short in quoting research on unemployment “Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.” Now with the unemployment rate going up, with a reasonable expectation being 20%+ starting at our current 4% that’s a 16% increase. That’s 640,000+ people dead from unemployment. And that’s before counting in the fact that we all now the suicide rate is going to spike as cabin fever starts to set in.
So the question is how many people are flattening the curve going to save? The way most articles put it, flattening the curve will prevent there from being a shortage of treatment, ventilators, beds, and the grim kind of rationing that we’re seeing in Italy. But I hate to ask because I understand how callous it sounds, but someone needs to ask the question: Is this preventing people from dying or just preventing doctors from having to make the hard call about who can and cannot be saved. Every discussion of flattening the curve seems to suggest that the majority of people will eventually get sick, and there doesn’t seem to be any discussion on how this will lower the death toll, only how it will lower hospital strain. Honestly how many people who get put on a ventilator are going to survive this? Are we letting nearly two-thirds of a million people die in silence so that a half million people who were going to die anyway have a last few days with a modicum of false hope and doctors able to soothe their consciences by saying they did everything they could?

I don’t have an answer to that. Mainly because no one does real reporting and asks these difficult questions.

But it’s a simple question is it going to save more than 640,000 people?

Is it? I’ve done some rough estimates that say if ventilators will save 10% of the people who are put on them then fewer will die by flattening the curve…but that is made based on so many assumptions due to lack of information I will never have. But just because I don’t have that information doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t have or couldn’t get it, but I know from many years of experience government never asks the right questions.

Because if it isn’t then we picked a policy that will actually kill MORE people.
And worse if reporters aren’t asking this question, then you know for sure none of the sycophantic populist buffoons in the White House, 10 Downing, or any of the halls of power are asking it.
Yeah, seeing elderly people dying in the halls of hospitals in Italy is tragic. But what about all the heart attacks, suicides, strokes and other various ways people die due to the stress of unemployment?
It should be a simple question. Which path kills more people. And right now I’m feeling that the tragedy of the elderly dying in hospital halls is actually a smaller tragedy than the nearly two-thirds of a million deaths.
Granted I don’t have numbers or resources to model which path will have the least death. But I do know that doctors can be very short-sighted and have little understanding of practical costs, so while we may be listening to doctors in their own field, it might help to listen to economists as well and ask which path actually does the most harm.
Now, I certainly might be wrong and this is the best path. But what I am sure of is that no one is asking the right questions

Now granted Trump and his idiot followers who think that the stock market is the economy are just willing to throw people off to die because they don’t like how their quarterly profits are looking. But this is not an argument for that. Trump’s a moron and clearly not acting on anything other than his first grade understanding of how the economy works. But the fact that he’s a blithering idiot whom we all wish will get COVID-19 and spare us having to hear his fascist blather ever again, doesn’t negate the fact that the other side of this is not asking the right questions. Just as when the media ignored Obama’s human rights abuses on the border but only cared when Trump did it. They don’t ask the right questions ever, and so we need to demand that these questions be asked.

How many people will die from all causes if we do not flatten the curve?
How many people will die from all causes if we do flatten the curve?
No one seems to be asking these questions. And we need to. We need to find out which version has the least suffering. And then go with that option.